The New Republic

The last few weeks have produced two main avenues for criticizing
the war. The first is the series of Bush administration missteps
driving the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The second is the Bush
administration's apparent determination to "fix" intelligence
around its decision to go to war, as described in the so-called
Downing Street Memo.Democrats and independent-minded Republicans have mostly picked up
the first criticism. As Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel told U.S. News
%amp% World Report last week, "The White House is completely
disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as
they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq." And,
politically, it's pretty clear why critics would prefer this line
of attack. The easiest way to reconcile your support for the war
with the strategic and political disaster it has become is to blame
flawed execution.

But, intellectually, basing your criticism of the war entirely on
the administration's mismanagement is dubious if you supported it
in the first place. The more honest--and ultimately more
damning--criticism would seize on the apparent doctoring of
intelligence.

The best example of how not to criticize the administration is a New
York Times op-ed John Kerry published the day of President Bush's
speech this week. "Our mission in Iraq is harder," Kerry wrote,
"because the administration ignored the advice of others, went in
largely alone, underestimated the likelihood and power of the
insurgency, sent in too few troops to secure the country, destroyed
the Iraqi army through de-Baathification, failed to secure
ammunition dumps, refused to recognize the urgency of training Iraqi
security forces and did no postwar planning."

The problem with Kerry's argument is that there's a difference
between expecting the administration to fight a war competently and
expecting it to fight an entirely different kind of war than the
one you signed onto. Kerry is essentially accusing the
administration of botching democratization. And, to be fair, the
administration did begin by touting democratization as its goal
when it didn't find WMD. Prior to the war, however, there was
simply no indication that the administration intended to pursue
democratization seriously.

Recall, after all, that Dick Cheney spent the summer of 2002
asserting that American troops would be greeted by Iraqis as
"liberators," the suggestion being that the postwar phase would be
relatively smooth, certainly nothing that would require a costly,
long-term commitment. Throughout August and September, defense
correspondents like Tom Ricks of The Washington Post reported on
Pentagon war-planning, which emphasized the civilian leadership's
preference for a small contingent of relatively light, mobile
forces--closer to 100,000 in number than the 500,000 troops
mobilized for the first Gulf war. Then, three weeks before
Congress's vote to authorize force, administration officials
trekked to the Hill to suggest that the occupation would be
relatively short and painless. "[W]e are certainly looking at the
duration of any such mission with a goal of turning it over to
international elements or back to the people as quickly as
possible," said Colin Powell. "Nobody wants to go and stay for any
extended length of time if it is avoidable." Donald Rumsfeld
predicted the administration would benefit from the cooperation of
ordinary Iraqis. "[M]aybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think the Iraqi
people ought to have a voice in it," he said when asked about
postwar planning.

And all of this took place against the backdrop of Afghanistan,
where the administration professed lofty ambitions about liberty
and justice only to abandon the country to a rump force of
international peacekeepers and several thousand American troops.
"Afghanistan is a nation in name only," wrote the Post's Susan
Glasser and Peter Baker in June of 2002. "It is fragmented into
city-states dominated by warlords.... [A]s long as [Afghan President
Hamid] Karzai exercises no control over the provinces, little can
be done to rebuild his shattered country in a meaningful way."

Responsible Democrats and Republicans might have hoped the
administration would fight the kind of war likely to produce a
stable and democratic Iraq. Delaware Senator Joe Biden went so far
as to personally ask Bush to tell the American people what kind of
resources that mission would entail. But, in reality, a war with
these priorities simply wasn't the war the administration was
proposing (though it would have been more than happy to see
democracy as a serendipitous by-product). Which means that the
actual calculation members of Congress faced at the time of the
authorization vote wasn't whether they believed the administration
intended to bring democracy to Iraq. It was whether or not they
believed the threat posed by Saddam outweighed the very real risk
that his ouster would be followed by chaos. If they did, they had an
obligation to support the war. If they didn't, they had an
obligation to oppose it.

But, thanks to the administration's misuse of intelligence, this
calculation was utterly meaningless. In a series of speeches in the
fall of 2002, Bush asserted that the Iraqis had attempted to
purchase aluminum tubes used to make a uranium-enrichment device
and that Iraq had unmanned aerial vehicles that might be capable of
targeting the United States. A White House report predicted that
Saddam could build a nuclear bomb within months if he got his hands
on fissile material. All of these claims proved to be false. Now,
the Downing Street Memo tells us the administration knew its
intelligence was flawed and didn't particularly care.

Having to vote on a war likely to produce one type of threat (chaos
in Iraq) in order to eliminate a potentially larger threat (a
nuclear Iraq) is an unsavory decision. But it's the kind of
decision we elect Congress to make. That's why voters didn't warm
to Kerry's criticism of the war's execution during last fall's
campaign--it was hard to believe Iraq had turned out so much
differently than he had expected. And that's why they're not likely
to warm to it today.

But, in reality, the administration wasn't asking Congress to make a
tough call in favor of war. It was asking Congress to make a
decision that, had it been apprised of the actual intelligence on
Iraq, would have been a no-brainer-- against authorization. That's
the real scandal here. And, if people like Kerry and Hagel want to
assign blame, then intelligence-fixing would be the place to
start.

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